


lathbora viran

by merrin



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, F/M, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:08:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25016734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrin/pseuds/merrin
Summary: It’s a dagger to the heart she broke on her own months ago. Solas loved her, he had loved her, but she couldn’t make it enough to matter. She’d failed and all of her sacrifice, all the times she’d let him use her body, all the times she’d held him close and pretended, were nothing but memories she would now carry for the few minutes she had left in her life.She doesn’t have time to be sick. She doesn’t have time for much, really, except to find the one person she wants to see before the entire world ends.
Relationships: Female Inquisitor/Cullen Rutherford, Female Lavellan/Cullen Rutherford
Comments: 10
Kudos: 10





	lathbora viran

**Author's Note:**

> There's some brief Solas/Inquisitor stuff at the beginning, but Solas is very much the Dread Wolf here. This is probably the angstiest thing I've ever written.

“You can’t do this, Solas,” Ellana says. The wind on the ramparts steals her words almost as soon as she says them, but she knows Solas understands her. “What will happen to me?” 

Solas traps her against the stone, caging her with his arms on either side, his body pressed tight against hers. His eyes flash, and the wind around them dies, though she can still see the standards hanging from the ramparts dancing madly. “ _Ma vhenan_ ,” he says. “I must. I musn’t let my love, my selfish desires, distract me from the needs of my people, those I swore to protect. Their needs must outweigh mine. Besides, I—it doesn’t matter. We shall see when the time comes.” 

He kisses her, and Ellana throws everything she can into it, one last time: arms around his neck, rolling her hips where he’s pressed against her, the little sighs she knows he likes in between kisses. But he pulls away, and with a look of regret, he faces out toward the mountain, toward the open rift, to begin the ritual. 

It’s a dagger to the heart she broke on her own months ago. He loved her, he had loved her, but she couldn’t make it enough to matter. She’d failed and all of her sacrifice, all the times she’d let him use her body, all the times she’d held him close and pretended, were nothing but memories she would now carry for the few minutes she had left in her life. 

She doesn’t have time to be sick. She doesn’t have time for much, really, except to find the one person she wants to see before the entire world ends. 

Clutching at her chest, she runs down the stairs to the courtyard, where her friends, where Cullen, had been fighting the elves Solas had gathered to his service. She scans the courtyard frantically, and then she sees him.

“Cullen!” she screams, sliding across the courtyard in the blood and viscera, taking quick but cautious steps. 

The fight had been thickest here, the dead or gravely wounded (and really, at this point, is there much of a difference?) in a loose, splayed circle around him. He doesn’t know they’ve already lost, and so he fights on, any of Solas’s loyal elves that come at him with a bared blade. The former templars he’d spent so many months training either fell beside him or fled the field. She knows her companions are somewhere in this mess, either in the courtyard or up on the ramparts or thrown off the mountain entirely, but she can’t think about them right now. 

None of this should have happened, she’d tried so hard to keep this from happening. 

She sees Cullen sway on his feet as he slices through his opponent, turning and steeling himself as he faces the next bared blade. He’s lost his shield, or he can’t hold it anymore. He holds his left arm tucked close to his side. With a flick of her staff, she encompasses the remaining elves in a cage of lightning, then drops the staff to the ground. 

He turns just as she throws herself at him. She sees him recognize her in the few moments before catching her and whirling her into an alcove behind the tavern. “Ellana.” He bends his head down towards her and she lifts up on her toes, already closing her eyes. When he doesn’t kiss her she opens them. 

His face looks as dark and tortured as it had been that afternoon months ago when she told him she couldn’t do this, that she loved Solas. When she didn’t tell Cullen that she lied, that nothing had ever touched her heart like he had, that she thought of him day and night, waking and sleeping, and couldn’t forget a single moment. 

“No,” she says, desperate to make him understand. Her grip falters on his chain mail, sliding through blood that may or may not be his. She puts her hands on his neck and feels the rasping, deep gulps of air as he catches his breath. “No, it’s you, it’s always been you. It was never him. Cullen, he’s going to tear down the Veil. He’s Fen’Harel—it doesn’t matter. He’s going to tear down the Veil and bring back the ancient elves and it’s going to rip our world apart. I thought . . . I thought I could stop it, maybe if he loved me enough, he wouldn’t do it.”

She doesn’t know if he understands her at first, her words take that long to sink in, confusion knitting his brows together. “You what?”

“I thought it was working,” she says. “Breaking the Veil will kill all of us, including me. I thought, maybe if I could convince him to love me enough, that I loved him, he wouldn’t do it. But I failed, I wasn’t enough. I—” 

She stops as she feels him steel himself again, going from bending around her gently to squaring his shoulders to march into a battle he can’t hope to win. “Where is he,” he says, and it isn’t a question. His fingers clutching her shoulders still curl softly, so much more gentle than the rage that flickers across his face. 

She touches that face, cupping her hands around the anger and the sadness both. “It’s too late,” she says on a sob. “It’s already begun. Stay here, stay with me.” She tries to draw him closer, to hold on to as many moments as she can. 

“It can’t be,” he says, trying to set her aside but she’s too determined now to hold onto everything she’d given up. 

“Cullen,” she says, pulling his face down toward hers, forcing him to meet her eyes. “It is. Can’t you feel it?” She’s never had to question how the real world felt before, not in relation to the Fade, which was so other. And neither felt like when Morrigan took her to the Crossroads. It’s the Crossroads she feels closest now, here in the real world where she shouldn’t be able to feel anything. 

She hears his sword clatter against the stone in the courtyard and in that moment, she feels his surrender. Her strong, proud, fierce warrior accepts that which he cannot change, and he drops his forehead to hers. 

Behind her, there’s an absence of sound as her lightning fizzles out, and she spares a brief glance over her shoulder at the smoldering bodies of the remaining elves. The grimaces frozen on their faces tell her they won’t move again.

She turns back to Cullen. “I love you,” she whispers in the quiet space they’ve created. 

“I love you too,” he whispers back. 

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be. I know what you were trying to do.” 

She tangles her fingers in his curls as she’s always wanted to, almost crying at the feel of his hands meeting at the small of her back, his arms warm and tight around her. She doesn’t know what to do with these last moments, how to talk to him, here at the end of all things. 

“What if it had never happened,” he says. “You never came to me that afternoon and we continued as we started. I danced with you at the Winter Palace.” 

She opens her mouth to correct him. The memories of Solas twirling her around the balcony, meeting Cullen’s eyes through the window before he turned away, still haunt her. So many times, she had woken up in Solas’s bed dreaming about dancing with Cullen. And then she realizes what he’s doing. “You were so dashing,” she says. Tears slip down her cheeks unnoticed and she blinks them away, not wanting to miss a moment. “You didn’t step on my toes a single time.” 

“And then afterward,” he says, “when you kissed me in the moonlit garden.” 

She laughs, or she sobs, she can’t tell anymore. “Would that have been before or after they cleared the remains of Florianne off the flagstone?”

He kisses her forehead and chuckles, but she can feel him tense. He has a view out into the courtyard, and she can only see his chest. There’s just the moans and cries of the wounded now. “Cullen,” she says. “Back with me.” 

She can actually see him blink away the despair this time. “When you came to me that afternoon, I wanted to tell you that it didn’t matter how the fight against Corypheus ended, what happened to the Inquisition after. I wanted to tell you that I’d never let you go, that you’d never lose me if you still wanted me.” 

The wreckage in his voice finds an echo in her soul. “I did,” she says. “I do.” 

He squeezes his eyes closed for a moment, face just on the brink of losing composure completely, but then he catches himself. “Our house would have been a comfortable size.”

She can see the green of the Fade flicking around the edge of her sight, so she closes her eyes against it. “How big is comfortable?” she asks. He chuckles, his mouth so close to hers now that she can feel the breath of it ghost across her skin.

“Big enough for a growing family, but not too big to invite the in-laws for extended stays.” 

“Like that would stop Mia.” She can almost see it on the backs of her eyelids. “We’d have a garden.” 

“And a dog.” 

She can feel her world becoming more insubstantial. There’s warmth in the arms around her, but no pressure. She opens her eyes again. Cullen’s form is amorphous, she can see the stone wall behind him. There’s gentle pressure against her cheek, a wisp of a smile, and then he’s gone. 

He’s gone, and as overwhelming despair crashes around her, she realizes she remains. She presses her hands against the stone where he’d just stood, mouth open on a silent cry. She can feel the flames of her magic flicking up her arms as she teeters on the brink of losing control. 

She looks out into the courtyard where one-by-one the bodies of the shemlen disappear while the elves remain. 

A deep voice intones from above. “ _Ma vhenan_ ,” it says. And then she sees him up on the ramparts. Solas. Fen’Harel. The Dread Wolf. He looks down at her and smiles and even from here she can see that it isn’t the loving smile she’s been coaxing out of him for months. It’s sinister and knowing and bright with rage and she knows, she knows he saw their last few moments. 

“My love,” he says. “It worked.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to swaps55 for all of the enthusiasm and a very thorough beta in the middle of the night, and to causeways for, as ever, pointing out my numerous comma splices. 
> 
> Roughly translated, the title means "the path to a place of lost love."
> 
> If you'd like to read the tumblr post that inspired the decision to not have them kiss even once, you can find that [here](https://urrone.tumblr.com/post/622284280785240064/fuck-a-last-kiss-for-your-otp).


End file.
